Salesforce Unveils Second Generation of Service Cloud

Salesforce released the next iteration of its Service Cloud, boasting fast set up and a new out of the box experience PHOTO:
Salesforce

Salesforce rolled out the second generation of its Service Cloud this morning. Per Salesforce's usual M.O. for application upgrades, it sports faster set-up capabilities, productivity enhancements around the console function and a brand new mobile app for service agents.

The offering has been built on Lightning — a low-code drag-and-drop app builder based on the open source Aura Framework, whose speciality is developing dynamic web apps — and its capabilities can be seen throughout this new version of Service Cloud.

Faster Set Up

The San Francisco-based company said the addition of Lightning helps speed the new setup capabilities in Service Cloud.

“The capabilities to set up the service is much faster than the previous version,” Keith Pearce, vice president of Marketing for Service Cloud told CMSWire.

He noted a lot of variables can make comparisons difficult, but went on to say set up of the latest version can take place in a day compared to a week previously, Pearce said.

"Within minutes you could have email published and operationalized," he said. "Case management is literally out of the box. What we have done is taken all the learnings from our previous customers and packed them into setup wizards."

"Lightning was a huge enabler," Gautam Vasudev, senior director of Product Management for Service Cloud told CMSWire. "It allows us to create very descriptive workflows for the admin as well as allow a user to test the setup before publishing it."

Out of the Box functionality in the new Service Cloud

A New Mobile App, Productivity Enhancements

The release also comes with a new mobile app aimed for a service agent — this is not a field service app — who doesn’t sit at the console all day, but moves around the office. The mobile app allows the rep to service customers from a device when not at a desktop.

Service Cloud also added several new productivity enhancements.

Agents, for example, can now view a case status — from open to escalated to pending to closed — in a tile effect. This feature is called Case Kanban.

"It is helpful for agents to view it that way," Pearce said.

Another new feature, Community Agent 360, surfaces the most recently reviewed community history and articles from a customer. Also new is the federated search function, which keeps search inside the agent console on one single view while searching through Salesforce as well as external data sources such as Confluence, YouTube, Dropbox and Box.

Finally, there is a macro builder that shows off its Lightning-based foundation. "Set up is point-and-click," Vasudev said. "The user can log in and start recording a macro by pointing to elements on the page."

Users can also avail themselves of 75 Lightning-enabled service partner apps to add to Service Cloud’s functionality. Voice is now an option for users with telephony and call center management capabilities from Dialpad, NewVoiceMedia and Talkdesk. There is also IoT asset tracking and mapping from MapAnything Live.

All in all, it is a solid upgrade for Service Cloud, Pearce said. Users had been asking for much of this functionality, he added — another common trait in Salesforce upgrades.

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